Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson

interest. To Freud, the principal thrust was sexual. Both assumed that religion, the old impulse which moved men and masses, was a fantasy and always had been. Friedrich Nietzsche, the third of the trio, was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention but as a casualty, and his demise as in some important sense an historical event, which would have dramatic consequences. He wrote in 1886: ‘The greatest event of recent times – that “God is Dead”, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable – is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.’ 145 Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the ‘Will to Power’, which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance.

TWO
The First Despotic Utopias

    Lenin left Zurich to return to Russia on 8 April 1917. Some of his comrades in exile accompanied him to the station, arguing. He was to travel back through Germany at the invitation of General Ludendorff, who guaranteed him a safe passage provided he undertook not to talk to any German trade unionists on the way. War breeds revolutions. And breeding revolutions is a very old form of warfare. The Germans called it Revolutionierungspolitik. 1 If the Allies could incite the Poles, the Czechs, the Croats, the Arabs and the Jews to rise against the Central Powers and their partners, then the Germans, in turn, could and did incite the Irish and the Russians. If the Germans used Lenin, as Churchill later put it, ‘like a typhoid bacillus’, they attached no particular importance to him, lumping him in with thirty other exiles and malcontents. The arguing comrades thought Lenin would compromise himself by accepting German aid and tried to dissuade him from going. He brushed them aside without deigning to speak and climbed on the train. He was a fierce little man of forty-six, almost bald but (according to the son of his Zurich landlady) ‘with a neck like a bull’. Entering his carnage he immediately spotted a comrade he regarded as suspect: ‘Suddenly we saw Lenin seize him by the collar and … pitch him out onto the platform.’ 2
    At Stockholm, comrade Karl Radek bought him a pair of shoes, but he refused other clothes, remarking sourly, ‘I am not going to Russia to open a tailor’s shop.’ Arriving at Beloostrov on Russian soil, in the early hours of 16 April, he was met by his sister Maria and by Kamenev and Stalin, who had been in charge of the Bolshevik paper Pravda. He ignored his sister completely, and Stalin whom he had not met, and offered no greeting to his old comrade Kamenev whom he had not seen for five years. Instead he shouted at him, ‘What’s this you have been writing in Pravda? We saw some of your articles and roundly abused you.’ Late that night he arrived at theFinland Station in Petrograd. He was given a bunch of roses and taken to the Tsar’s waiting-room. There he launched into the first of a series of speeches, one of them delivered, still clutching the roses, from the top of an armoured car. The last took two hours and ‘filled his audience with turmoil and terror’. Dawn was breaking as he finished. He retired to bed, said his